#BookReview ‘The Lying Club’ by Annie Ward

About the book…

“If you loved Big Little Lies and Little Fires Everywhere, allow me to introduce you to your next obsession. —Kim Liggett, New York Times bestselling author of The Grace Year

A tangled web of lies draws together three women in this explosive thriller of revenge, murder and shocking secrets

At an elite private school nestled in the Colorado mountains, Natalie, an office assistant, dreams of having a life like the school moms she deals with every day. Women like Brooke—a gorgeous heiress, ferociously loving mother and serial cheater—and Asha, an overprotective mom who suspects her husband of having an affair. Their fates are bound by the handsome assistant athletic director Nicholas, whom Natalie loves, Brooke wants and Asha needs.

But when two bodies are carried out of the school one morning, it seems the tension between mothers and daughters, rival lovers, and the haves and have-nots has shattered the surface of this isolated, affluent town—where people stop at nothing to get what they want.

Hugest of thanks to Joe Christie, who kindly sent me the review copy of ‘The Lying Club’ by Annie Ward which is out from March 8th 2022 from Quercus, to accompany this wonderful blogger blast !

To read The Lying Club is to become submerged in  a whirlpool that tightens around you in ever decreasing circles of rage, recrimination, guilt, and lies, until, finally , you center on the truth of just whose bodies were removed from The Falcon Academy gymnasium.

Beginning with a disoriented Natalie Belliman, the Academy front of house admin assitant to the principal, who comes around in a car, a man’s tie clutched in her hand, outside the gym, and approaching it, sees human remains in the centre of the court, you know you in for one hell of a ride.

Interspersing the police transcripts of Natalie’s interviews with narratives from alpha mothers, Brooke and Asha is a genius mover. You see mothers and daughters pitted against each other, mothers who want the best for their children when their children just want them to leave them alone.

The small town feel of everyone knowing each other’s business is a kind of façade, as the town appears to subsist on gossip and speculation, with no one actually admitting to the truth about anything, this is all that’s left as currency to trade in. And, at the centre of this all, is the P.E teacher, nick McGuire, whose patronage could get either Brooke’s daughter, Sloan, or Asha’s daughter, Mia into the college both want to get into. Or do they?

As you read, the impression grows on you that these daughters are conduits of their mother’s ambitions, articles of one-upmanship in the social strata.

Yet, for all her cosmetic enhancement,  and inherited billions, Brooke has no husband and little hope of getting another. As a parent, she is floundering, alienating those she believes will unduly influence Sloane-and when Sloane makes unwise choices with her boyfriend, Reade, then is she just acting like any other child, or is she proving Brooke right?

Asha is the agent of dreams, she sells houses and the illusion of belonging and of wealth in a town where her mixed race marriage is not only held up as a sign of inclusivity, it is seen as exotic and othered. In fact, this is what has Brooke so worried that Mia , as a mixed race girl, will be prioritised in the name of diversity over Sloane.

Nick is caught in the middle of this, and his relationship with Natalie, once discovered, becomes another issue between the warring mothers, and as you are desperately trying to untangle one relationship from the other-just who is Jill Ruiz, the local doctor, and what happened to her daughter who is commemorated on a plaque at Falcon Academy?-you are so very keen to not only know more about these intertwined, highly privileged yet woefully lacking families, but also to know just who died? Was it murder? Was it suicide and murder? Just what happened?

But at the same time, you can understand, to a point, just how these women ended up int he situation that they are in, trapped as they are by the accoutrements of wealth with no real role models to look up to. When you are at the top of the social pyramid, where do you turn to for advice?

One mother is trying to secure the future for her daughter which she believes will set her on the path to success. This involves extortionate payments for private physio, private coaching, injections and extra training as well as presenting her as ‘a package’ to the college recruitment teams. She wants fidelity and loyalty and yet is completely incapable of giving it in return.

The other mother is trying to do the same, except she is back at the start of the parenting journey, finding out that she is pregnant just as she is panicking about her husband having an affair. You can almost sense her hearing the cell doors closing on her again as she is left to manage the household, her career, her children at the same time as her husband is off doing more important things such as business mergers. Or having an affair, Or both. Either way, he is not there where she needs him to be.

The sheer levels of neediness, of greediness for success either for themselves, or their children as an extension of themselves, leads these very different women down paths from which there is no return.

This is a crime novel, a psychological thriller, and a study in humanity’s excesses all at the same time and I couldn’t have been happier to end a truly rubbish week, escaping far away, and reading about the lives of these impossibly groomed and raised women.

About the author…

Annie’s sophomore novel and first psychological thriller ,‘Beautiful Bad’ was  published by Harper Collins/Park Row books in March, 2019.

Annie received a BA in English Lit with an emphasis in Creative Writing from UCLA and an MFA in Screenwriting from the American Film Institute. While studying at AFI, she sold her first short screenplay to MTV/ BFCS Productions. Starring Adam Scott, STRANGE HABIT became a Grand Jury Award Winner at the Aspen Film Festival and a Sundance Festival Official Selection.

After film school, Annie moved to Eastern Europe to work for Fodor Travel Guides, covering regions of Spain and Bulgaria. She remained in Bulgaria for five years spanning a civilian uprising and government overthrow. The novel ‘The Making Of June’, which Annie wrote with the Bulgarian revolution and Balkan crisis as its backdrop was sold to Penguin Putnam and published to critical acclaim in 2002.

During Annie’s five years in the Balkans she received a Fulbright Scholarship, taught at the University of Sofia, and script doctored eight screenplays for Nu-Image, an Israeli/American film company that produced a number of projects in Bulgaria for the SyFy Channel. She was later the recipient of an Escape to Create artist residency.

She lives in Kansas City, Kansas with her family.

Links-https://www.annie-ward.com/

Twitter @_AnnieWard @QuercusBooks